Helena weekly herald. [volume] (Helena, Mont.) 1867-1900, 1887-10-13

y
capital representative. He looks quite too
good natured for the business he is in, hut he
stirs witness up occasionally, all the same.
To his right sits the soft voiced blonde,
Hon. E. Ellery Anderson, Of New York city,
who does the questioning for the commission.
His manner of opening the attack on any
special point is extremely deferential, the
very height of courtesy; but at about the
seventh question he has the witness in a
corner, as it were. At the head of the table
sits Ex-Governor Pattison, of Pennsylvania,
chair of the commission; and nature
could arcely have formed more striking
contrast than that between him and Mr..
Anderson, for the governor is very dark
brunette-dar1 as the typical Spaniard Of
Andalusia. Hair, beard and eyebrows are
Of dead black; but, like the other two men,
bers, he has the size. In fact, striking
feature of the whole affair is the bigness OF
the participants-there are no little men in
the business, and Mr.. Huntington, the
champion tness, is apparently the biggest
and most imposing Of the lot. In size and
general make up he bears curious resem-
blance to the late Brigham Young, except
that he lacks that heavy under jaw and
puffed lip which gave the Mormon chiefs
face suggestion of grossness.
Mr.. Huntington is the center of attraction,
and at times is noticeably nervous, mani
festation which causes a smile among the OBJ
servers. Nobody laughs at a little thin fellow
for being nervous-we expect of him; but
when great mass Of blood and brain, Drawn
and healthy flesh like this fidgets like
schoolboy or slightly reddens as a budding
maiden, there is a comical contradiction be-
tween the subject and the action. And just
in proportion as he gets excited he forgets his
grammar; provincialisms Of his Connecticut
boyhood come out, and he tells what 1--WE
done and why we done!it," or "guesses the
commission will have to 60 to the documents
for that" But in one part of his testimony
on the day the writer was present he became
highly dramatic-actually thrilling. That
was when he told Of his experience with the
wild Indians of Nevada: how Winnemucca
could rally 5000 warriors; how his band had
defeated the soldiers and killed 175 persons at
Big Meadow; how he and the Central Pacific
made a special treaty with Winnemucca,
gave him a special car free, carried his peo-
pie free on the freight trains, and how all
this produced lasting peace with those Indi-
ans, till now the sage brush plains of Nevada
were as safe as the Mohawk vale and in d
fair way to blossom as the rose. In short,
MIR. Huntington waxed so eloquent in various
statements of what he had done for his coun-
try and his fellow citizens, that it was actu-
ally pathetic; and one felt for the time that
the prosecuted patriot should be dismissed
with pension.
He had just got warmed up in his first di-
gression of this nature when Gen. Grenv'ue
NJ. Dodge, the not ~ (A
ed engineer-in-chief WE&A
of the Union Pacif- 9sSx, so
ic, entered and took (anA e GS1 M
seat near him. A%/\ sf1A MA
Gen. Dodge is inGS/~ ~1HsN
a t b er feeble Fl %AW
health; his form, n ~u.NE M
which was once so ~ Kew
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of his Iowa soldiers, is sadly bowed, and
as be leaned forward to catch the words of
the witness, his hand held to his "good ear" in
dicated that that sense too was failing. Some
thing in Mr.. Huntington's testimony seemed
:. ..-,usa the general hugely: he repreSSed